When I was in France last month for LeWeb3 I was having a real hard time finding good internet connectivity - even at the LeWeb3 conference. When I went around Paris trying to connect, even the god dammed Starbucks was charging me 4 euros an hour (~7.20 USD) for connectivity that was only half good (and I had to put in a series of long hexadecimal numbers BY HAND in order to activate the connectivity).
That's how far behind Internet Connectivity was in Paris; earlier last year I was also in France, part of the time in Paris and the rest in Aix-en-Provence - where the connectivity was even worse.
Not only that - but everyone I met seemed to be using computers and connecting to the internet much as we'd have done here 10-15 years ago. Perhaps the best use of the Internets in French pubs and bistros - where I'm told, most have internet connectivity for free, but it's kinda slow (not perfect for Seesmic, if you know what I mean, Loic).
But now that Time Warner is plotting to start metering our internet usage and charge us for it - starting first in Texas, Jeff Jarvis - getting ready to attend Davos (where I wish I could go - dream on) complains on how he's being stiffed in Munich, today, the same way Time Warner is going to try to stiff us all, in a few years:
"…I’m getting a preview of Time Warner’s doomed idea to charge internet access based on usage.
At the hotel here in Munich, I’m getting criminally overcharged for internet access by the hotel and Swiss: They’re charging me 27 euros for 24 hours to get
supposedly unlimited speed(ha! I tested and it’s slow; I can’t even watch a YouTube video worth a damn and it almost took longer to download On the Media than to listen to it) and downloading. They’d charge me a bit less if I agreed to getting lower priority for my packets — the hint is that at the slower speed, I couldn’t be able to use Skype or watch videos — and an unspecified limit on my bandwidth. Being forced to pay a premium to get acceptable service makes me mad enough; not getting acceptable service makes me resent them even more."
I'm not sure if Jeff is complaining about not getting what he's paying for or pissed that he's being charged the equivalent of $43.00 USD a day, being screwed for it.
One of the things I've maintained, all along, is, you can't go back - if your giving people unlimited internet now, and then….. suddenly you want to revoke that an put a taxi meter on a cable subscribers internet - all while upping their bills - your going to have blood on the streets.
People live the internet now - they're on all the time.
However, I do see this as a pattern - that internet providers will try to put the meter on us, whenever they can.
And that gets me to investigate the conflicts that are inherit here. For example, aren't the cable and media companies producing all this rich media to download that is clogging up our bandwidth now? And aren't people making free use of the internet to follow their favorite stars and celebrities? And doesn't media, who also, in many cases own the cable companies and have interests in telecoms, the very suppliers of the cholesterol of the internet?
And they are the ones that are now wanting to charge us for downloading too much of what they are producing - it's perverse.
